Amazon Marketplace and Seller Fees Explained: How It Earns

Picture a landlord who owns a big shopping mall and also runs a shop inside it. The landlord's own shop books each sale at the full price on the tag. The other shops pay rent, a cut of each sale and a charge for the landlord's storeroom and vans, and the landlord books only those payments. Shoppers walking past rarely know which counter belongs to whom.

That setup is easy to misread from outside. The landlord's own sales look small next to the crowds, because most of the goods sold there belong to someone else. The rent and the cut grow on a different path from the shop's sales, and they earn a different profit margin. They also draw different critics, from tenants who say the charges are too high to officials who ask whether the tenants could go anywhere else.

An online marketplace is that mall with a website for a front door. To read one as an investor, you need three answers: how much of the store the outside sellers supply, how much the owner collects from them, and what could shrink either number.

Amazon runs a mall of this kind, and each quarterly report says how much its sellers supply and how much Amazon collects, in more detail than most investors read. On BloFin you can hold Amazon's share price as tokenized Amazon on the AMZNX/USDT Spot pair, or trade it with leverage through the AMZNUSDT Perpetual. Either one carries the marketplace inside Amazon's results.

What is Amazon's marketplace?

Amazon's marketplace is the part of its store where outside firms, which Amazon calls third-party sellers, list and sell their own goods. Amazon is not the seller of record on those sales and books only its fees. Those sellers supplied 61% of the units customers paid for in the second quarter of 2026 (source: Amazon Q2 2026 results release).

The seller of record is the firm that legally sells you the item, sets its price and owns it until the sale. Amazon's annual report says it earns fixed fees, a share of sales, per-unit fees, interest, or some mix of these from its seller programs (source: Amazon 2025 Form 10-K). Goods Amazon sells from its own stock count at the full price as product sales. For items sold by third-party sellers, Amazon counts only its net share, as service sales (source: Amazon 2025 Form 10-K).

Say you order a $40 set of food storage containers from an outside seller. Amazon's income from that order is the commission and any fulfillment fee the seller pays. It is booked when the parcel goes to a carrier, or reaches you if Amazon delivers it (source: Amazon 2025 Form 10-K). The containers never become Amazon's stock, even if they sit in its warehouse, because sellers keep ownership of goods that Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA) holds for them (source: Amazon 2025 Form 10-K). FBA is Amazon's service that stores, packs and ships a seller's goods for a fee.

One cost runs the other way. Payment-processing costs are based on the full price paid, so seller sales cost Amazon more to process, for each dollar it books, than its own sales do (source: Amazon 2025 Form 10-K). Where this fee income sits among Amazon's seven revenue lines, and which segment's profit it lands in, is traced in Amazon's business segments.

How much of Amazon's store third-party sellers supply

Amazon's seller unit mix, the share of its paid units that third-party sellers supply, was 61% in the second quarter of 2026 (source: Amazon Q2 2026 results release). Paid units are items customers bought and paid for. The mix was 53% at the end of 2019 (source: Amazon Q4 2020 results release).

Most of the rise came between 2019 and 2023. The mix reached 55% in the last quarter of 2020 and 56% a year later (source: Amazon Q4 2021 results release). It hit 59% at the end of 2022 and 61% at the end of 2023 (source: Amazon Q4 2023 results release). Since then it has stayed in a narrow band: 62% at the end of 2024, 61% at the end of 2025 and 60% in the first quarter of 2026 (source: Amazon Q1 2026 results release), before it went back to 61% in the second quarter (source: Amazon Q2 2026 results release).

A steady share can still sit inside a fast-growing store. Say you look at 100 items sold a year ago, 62 of them from outside sellers. Paid units grew 17% in the second quarter of 2026, so the same store now sells about 117 items, and 61% of those is about 71 (source: Amazon Q2 2026 results release). The sellers' share barely moved, yet their volume grew by about 15%. The unit figures leave out Whole Foods Market (source: Amazon Q2 2026 results release).

Units are only half the story, because a phone case and a TV each count as one. Amazon's seller team gives the share in sales instead. In its fee letter of October 15, 2025, it said that more than 60% of the sales in Amazon's store come from independent sellers, most of them small and mid-sized firms (source: Amazon Selling Partners, October 15, 2025). Amazon repeated the figure at its seller conference in Seattle in September 2026 (source: Amazon Selling Partners, September 29, 2026).

Amazon's third-party seller services revenue

Third-party seller services is the revenue line that holds Amazon's marketplace income. It brought in $172.2 billion in 2025, 24.0% of Amazon's net sales (source: Amazon 2025 Form 10-K), up from $80.5 billion and 20.8% in 2020 (source: Amazon 2022 Form 10-K). The line holds commissions, fulfillment and shipping fees, and other seller services (source: Amazon Q2 2026 results release).

Its share of Amazon's net sales rose each year from 20.8% in 2020 (source: Amazon 2022 Form 10-K) to 24.5% in 2024, then slipped to 24.0% in 2025 (source: Amazon 2025 Form 10-K).

Two patterns stand out. The line more than doubled from 2020 to 2025, while its share of Amazon's sales rose by about three points and then settled near a quarter. Growth also slowed and then picked up. It was 10.3% in 2025 (source: Amazon 2025 Form 10-K), the slowest of the five years from 2021 (source: Amazon 2022 Form 10-K). In the second quarter of 2026 it was 15.9%, as the line reached $46.8 billion against $40.3 billion a year earlier (source: Amazon Q2 2026 results release).

That growth sat close to the growth in units. Paid units rose 17% and the sellers' share slipped from 62% to 61%, which puts growth in seller units at about 15% (source: Amazon Q2 2026 results release). The money Amazon earned from those sellers grew 16% (source: Amazon Q2 2026 results release). Both inputs are rounded to whole numbers, so the safe reading is that Amazon earned about the same per seller unit as a year before. Its next report, for the third quarter, will update these figures, and Amazon's earnings reports shows where they sit in a release. When that report lands, the AMZNX/USDT Spot trading page shows the token's price as investors read the new seller figures.

What a seller pays Amazon on one sale

A pro seller in the United States pays Amazon $39.99 a month for its plan, a referral fee on each sale, and an FBA fee if Amazon stores and ships the goods (source: Amazon, Sell on Amazon pricing). Ads are optional, with added costs (source: Amazon, Sell on Amazon pricing). Each payment lands on one of Amazon's revenue lines.

The referral fee is Amazon's commission. It is a share of the total price, shipping and gift wrap included, set by product type, with a minimum charge for most types (source: Amazon, Sell on Amazon pricing). Amazon's public schedule sets 8% for computers and consumer electronics, 15% for home and kitchen goods and 45% for Amazon device accessories (source: Amazon, Sell on Amazon pricing). Some rates step with price, such as clothing at 5% to 17% (source: Amazon, Sell on Amazon pricing).

Here is the $40 set of food storage containers again, sold by a seller who uses FBA.

• The referral fee is 15% of $40, which is $6.00, well over the $0.30 minimum for home and kitchen goods (source: Amazon, Sell on Amazon pricing).

• The FBA fee is a charge per unit sold (source: Amazon Selling Partners, October 15, 2025). Amazon's fee calculator works it out from the item's dimensions, weight, category and price (source: Amazon, Sell on Amazon pricing).

• The $39.99 plan fee is spread across every unit the seller sells that month.

• Any sponsored listing the seller buys, to rank higher in search, is billed on its own.

In Amazon's books, the referral fee and the FBA fee land on the third-party seller services line, which counts commissions, fulfillment and shipping fees, and other seller services (source: Amazon Q2 2026 results release). The plan fee is one of the fixed fees Amazon says it earns from its seller programs (source: Amazon 2025 Form 10-K). The sponsored listing lands on another line, advertising services, which counts sponsored ads sold to sellers, vendors and others (source: Amazon Q2 2026 results release). So one $40 sale can add to two of Amazon's revenue lines, and the $40 itself appears on neither.

Amazon raised FBA fees for 2026 by $0.08 per unit sold on average, which it put at less than 0.5% of an average item's price, and it added no new fee types (source: Amazon Selling Partners, October 15, 2025). That came after a year, 2025, with no rise in US referral or FBA fees (source: Amazon Selling Partners, October 15, 2025).

What is Amazon's take rate?

A take rate is the share of the value of goods sold on a marketplace that its owner keeps as revenue. Amazon's would be its seller services revenue divided by sellers' gross merchandise volume (GMV), the total value of the goods they sold. Amazon publishes the revenue but no dollar GMV, so its filings cannot give the ratio.

What Amazon does publish are shares. The seller unit mix comes each quarter, and its seller team puts independent sellers above 60% of store sales (source: Amazon Selling Partners, October 15, 2025). Neither share gives one year's seller sales in dollars. A take rate built on them would be a guess made outside Amazon's books, and it would swing with whatever guess fills the gap.

The ratio can be worked out where a firm does publish the volume. Say you take Shopify, which sells store software and payment services to merchants. It reported GMV of $115.6 billion for the second quarter of 2026 and revenue of $3.6 billion (source: Shopify Q2 2026 results release). Divide one by the other, and Shopify kept about 3.1% of the value its merchants sold. Its revenue comes from two lines, subscription solutions and merchant solutions, so the ratio measures a software and payments model (source: Shopify Q2 2026 results release).

Amazon's seller line is built a different way. It carries fulfillment and shipping fees on top of the commission, so Shopify's ratio is no guide to Amazon's. The nearest test you can run yourself is revenue against units, as in the second quarter of 2026, when the fee line grew 16% and seller units about 15%. If revenue per unit rises, the fees are earning more per item. If it falls, sellers may be shipping cheaper or lighter goods, or buying fewer of Amazon's paid services.

Why the FTC's case centers on the marketplace

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) case against Amazon centers on the marketplace. Its complaint, filed with 17 states on September 26, 2023, alleges monopoly power in online superstores and in the services sold to sellers (source: FTC). It says the fees add up to close to half of many sellers' total revenue (source: FTC).

The FTC's release names the fees it means, from a monthly fee sellers pay to ad fees it says have become close to necessary. It also says Amazon ties the Prime badge to the use of FBA (source: FTC). Say you look again at the $40 food storage containers. On the FTC's account, a seller who wants the Prime badge on that listing has to use FBA, so the FBA fee sits on top of the $6.00 referral fee for every unit sold. So the complaint lands on two revenue lines, third-party seller services and advertising. These are claims, and Amazon's filings say it disputes them and will defend itself (source: Amazon Q2 2026 Form 10-Q).

The case is set for a bench trial, a trial before a judge with no jury, on March 29, 2027 (source: FTC v. Amazon docket). Before then the court will hold a hearing it calls Economics Day, on December 4, 2026. In a status report filed on October 2, 2026, the FTC, 19 states and territories, and Amazon said they would send their plans for it by October 9 (source: FTC v. Amazon status report). What each possible remedy would touch, and how a holder handles a trial date, is the subject of the FTC antitrust case and Amazon stock.

AI shopping agents and Amazon v. Perplexity

An AI shopping agent is software that finds and buys products for a person. Amazon asks dozens of named agents to stay off its site and is suing Perplexity AI over the agent in its Comet browser. On August 4, 2026 an appeals court threw out Amazon's early win (source: Ninth Circuit opinion, August 4, 2026).

The blocking starts with robots.txt, a public file that tells bots which parts of a site they may visit. Amazon's file names 99 crawlers and agents and asks each one to stay off the whole site. Among them are agents named GoogleAgent-Shopping, ChatGPT-User and Perplexity-User (source: Amazon robots.txt). A robots.txt entry is a request, not a lock, so Amazon also relies on its Conditions of Use. Amazon's lawsuit says those terms gained a section on AI agents on May 30, 2025, which asks agents to identify themselves and stay within limits Amazon sets (source: Amazon v. Perplexity, first amended complaint).

Amazon filed the case on November 4, 2025 in San Francisco (source: Amazon v. Perplexity docket). On March 9, 2026 Judge Maxine M. Chesney barred Perplexity from using AI agents to reach the password-protected parts of Amazon's site (source: Amazon v. Perplexity, order of March 9, 2026). The same order told Perplexity to destroy the Amazon data it had gathered (source: Amazon v. Perplexity, order of March 9, 2026). That order was a preliminary injunction, a court order that holds while a case is still being decided. The Ninth Circuit vacated it on August 4, finding Amazon unlikely to win under the federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. On the facts before the court, it was the user, helped by the agent, who reached Amazon's computers (source: Ninth Circuit opinion, August 4, 2026). Amazon then filed an amended complaint on September 21, 2026 that adds a claim that Perplexity interfered with its contracts (source: Amazon v. Perplexity, first amended complaint).

The threat to the marketplace is about where shoppers look. Sponsored listings pay Amazon because people see them on its results pages. Amazon's complaint says advertisers pay only for ads shown to humans, so agent traffic has to be screened out before advertisers are billed (source: Amazon v. Perplexity, first amended complaint). Say you ask an agent to reorder the cheapest pack of batteries. It may buy without ever showing you the paid listings at the top of the page. Amazon's annual report already counts virtual assistants and comparison sites among its rivals, including those built on AI (source: Amazon 2025 Form 10-K).

Amazon is building its own agents at the same time. By the end of 2025 its Rufus helper could shop tens of millions of items in other online stores and buy them for customers through a feature called Buy For Me (source: Amazon Q4 2025 results release). Rufus is now part of Alexa for Shopping (source: Amazon Q2 2026 results release), which more than 350 million customers used in the year to September 2026 (source: Amazon Selling Partners, September 29, 2026). Amazon began selling sponsored prompts inside Rufus in the first quarter of 2026 (source: Amazon Q1 2026 results release), so its own agents keep ads in the shopping path.

Amazon's marketplace rivals: Alibaba, Shopify, MercadoLibre and Temu

Amazon competes for sellers with Alibaba's Taobao and Tmall in China (source: Alibaba June quarter 2026 results), Shopify's store software, MercadoLibre in Latin America (source: MercadoLibre Q2 2026 results), and Temu, run by PDD Holdings (source: PDD Holdings 2025 Form 20-F). Of these four, only Shopify and MercadoLibre put GMV, the input a take rate needs, in their latest results.

For the quarter to June 30, 2026, Amazon reports a share of units (source: Amazon Q2 2026 results release), while Shopify reports a dollar volume (source: Shopify Q2 2026 results release).

Two of these reports describe pressures Amazon also faces. MercadoLibre cut take rates for sellers in Brazil in some product groups and price ranges from April 2026, if their listings were priced competitively, and said the cut lowered revenue (source: MercadoLibre Q2 2026 results). Alibaba said 250 million users had had their first AI-driven shopping experience through the agent features of its Qwen app since the app launched (source: Alibaba June quarter 2026 results). It added that its customer management revenue would have grown 1% on a like-for-like basis, leaving out the revenue effect of a new business development program (source: Alibaba June quarter 2026 results).

The others are growing fast in their own markets. Shopify's GMV grew 31.6% from $87.8 billion a year earlier (source: Shopify Q2 2026 results release). MercadoLibre counted 795 million items sold in the quarter (source: MercadoLibre Q2 2026 results), and PDD's revenue was $16.6 billion, up 8% (source: PDD Q2 2026 results). Amazon's own annual report lists firms that sell online-store services, from web hosting to ads, shipping and payments, among its rivals, and says AI makes it easier for new or smaller firms to compete with it (source: Amazon 2025 Form 10-K). In the United States, Walmart also runs a marketplace, set against Amazon in Amazon and Walmart as stocks.

The marketplace and an AMZNX or AMZNUSDT position

The marketplace is about a quarter of Amazon's revenue, and its profit is never reported on its own. It sits inside the North America and International segments, while AWS, Amazon's cloud arm, earns most of the company's operating income (source: Amazon 2025 Form 10-K). Either BloFin product carries all of it at once, in one price.

Three numbers in each results release show how the marketplace is doing. The first is the sellers' share of paid units, 61% in the second quarter of 2026. The second is growth in third-party seller services, 16% that quarter. The third is growth in paid units, 17% (source: Amazon Q2 2026 results release). When fee growth runs ahead of unit growth, Amazon is earning more per item, and when it falls behind, it is earning less. A rule change from the FTC case or a court ruling on AI agents would show up in those three lines. The effect on margins then runs through segment profit, which Amazon's profit margins traces.

BloFin lists Amazon in two forms. Tokenized Amazon (AMZNX) tracks one Amazon share per token on the AMZNX/USDT Spot pair. The AMZNUSDT Perpetual is settled in USDT, with leverage of up to 20x and a funding payment every eight hours (source: BloFin, AMZNUSDT contract information). Funding is the regular payment between long and short positions that pulls the contract toward the share price.

Outside Nasdaq's regular session, orders on the perpetual may be limited to reduce-only orders, which may only cut a position you already hold. AMZNX trading hours maps those sessions. Say you hold 10 AMZNX through a results night on which seller fees beat unit growth. The token moves with the share, and you can sell it on the venue's own order book. Holding the same view through the perpetual adds funding and a liquidation price, a choice weighed in AMZNX against the AMZN perpetual.

Looking to gain exposure to Amazon? To get started, you'll need to first create a BloFin account, fund your account with cryptocurrency, and navigate to the AMZNX/USDT Spot trading page or AMZNUSDT Perpetual page.

Frequently asked questions

Is Amazon charging a 3.5% fee?

Amazon added a 3.5% fuel and logistics surcharge to FBA fulfillment fees in the United States and Canada from April 17, 2026 (source: Digital Commerce 360, April 3, 2026). It is charged on the fulfillment fee, not on the item's sale price, and works out to about $0.17 per unit on average for US FBA. From May 2, 2026 it also applies to Buy with Prime in the United States and to Multi-Channel Fulfillment in the United States and Canada (source: Digital Commerce 360, April 3, 2026).

When does Amazon announce changes to its seller fees?

Amazon sends sellers its update to US referral and FBA fees near the end of each year (source: Amazon Selling Partners, October 15, 2025). The 2025 update, published on November 19, 2024, held both fees flat. The 2026 update, published on October 15, 2025, gave sellers at least 90 days before any increase and took effect on January 15, 2026. The fuel surcharge came on its own, announced in early April 2026 (source: Digital Commerce 360, April 3, 2026).

How much have independent sellers sold on Amazon?

Independent sellers have made more than $2.5 trillion in sales in Amazon's store over 25 years (source: Amazon Selling Partners, October 15, 2025). They employ more than 2 million people in the United States to run those businesses (source: Amazon Selling Partners, October 15, 2025). Amazon also cites Oxford Economics research that sellers in its US store supported more than $180 billion of US gross domestic product in 2025 (source: Amazon Selling Partners). That figure counts the sellers' own revenue plus the spending of the staff, suppliers and contractors they pay (source: Amazon Selling Partners).

Which AI agents does Amazon's robots.txt block?

Besides GoogleAgent-Shopping, ChatGPT-User and Perplexity-User, Amazon's robots.txt asks GoogleAgent-Mariner, Claude-User and Manus-User to stay off the whole site, along with crawlers such as GPTBot, PerplexityBot and Google-Extended (source: Amazon robots.txt). The list runs to 100 entries because ClaudeBot appears twice. At its September 2026 conference, Amazon also let sellers link their Seller Central data to outside AI tools, starting with Anthropic's Claude and Amazon's own Quick (source: Amazon Selling Partners, September 29, 2026).

What happens next in Amazon v. Perplexity?

Perplexity's response to Amazon's amended complaint is due on October 13, 2026, and if it moves to dismiss, Amazon's opposition is due by November 3 (source: Amazon v. Perplexity, order of September 30, 2026). The court's earlier schedule closes fact discovery on February 12, 2027 and sets a jury trial for September 27, 2027 in San Francisco (source: Amazon v. Perplexity docket). Both sides agreed that Perplexity's first motion to dismiss became moot once Amazon amended its complaint.

Researched and written by the BloFin Academy editorial team with AI-assisted drafting. All facts independently verified. Primary sources include Amazon's 2025 and 2022 Forms 10-K, its second-quarter 2026 Form 10-Q and its results releases from the fourth quarter of 2020 to the second quarter of 2026, Amazon's Sell on Amazon pricing page and Selling Partners announcements, and the FTC's release of September 26, 2023 and the FTC v. Amazon docket. They also include the Amazon v. Perplexity docket and filings, the Ninth Circuit's opinion of August 4, 2026, Amazon's robots.txt, PDD Holdings' 2025 Form 20-F, the Shopify, MercadoLibre, Alibaba and PDD results releases, Digital Commerce 360, and BloFin's AMZNUSDT contract information (last read October 2, 2026) and AMZNX/USDT and AMZNUSDT trading pages (last read October 4, 2026). The other sources are current as of October 5, 2026.

Nothing in this article constitutes financial advice, and nothing in it is a recommendation to buy, sell or hold Amazon in any form. Amazon publishes no dollar figure for its sellers' sales, so any take rate quoted for it is an outside estimate, and the fee line can grow more slowly than units if sellers shift to cheaper goods or fewer services. The FTC case and the Perplexity case can each end in rulings or settlements that change how the marketplace charges or who can shop it. AMZNX carries the issuer's risk as well as the share price, and a leveraged AMZNUSDT position can be liquidated by one results night's move. Past performance does not indicate future results. Do your own research and consider your risk tolerance before you trade on BloFin.